For me:

SS,IS,FT,DT (combined revenue) = about 77%
123,VEER,CAN,BIG,PM,SCAN (combined revenue) = about 22%
All the rest (combined revenue) = less than 1%

So it wouldn't make sense to concentrate on 4 or 5, because I would throw away about more than 20%.

It would make sense to concentrate on those producing the 99% of my earnings. But I am still uploading occasionally to a lot of minor sites, hoping for future changes. I am probably wasting my time now, but who knows? It's better to be there in advance.

Youre missing the point both of you!! if you gave up the small sites that just gave a payout, right. You would ofcourse have much more time over for the major earners, more time, resulting in much more uploads, in the long run resulting in more revenues!
You would have much more controle, much less hassle. I mean just think of an MR, going to say 7 differant sites and all with their own MR policies.

putting all eggs in one basket, is one saying but putting them in too many???  well look what happend to GM ( with 20 brands)

You mention Veer, as example,  sure!  but whats to say that Veer will still be around in a few years time? they certainly cant rely on Corbis to bail them, I can tell you that and with the going track, just look whats happend to many sites lately, StocXpert should have taught us a lesson.

Wouldnt it make more sense to concentrate dead-.hard on say 4 or 5 sites, giving it everything and more, instead of wasting precious time and effort on something which really doesnt work?

No, it wouldn't.
We need at least 10 strong sites, or better 15. Otherwise the big ones will sc%# us without mercy. Or worse, getty will buy the remaining sites from the big 4 and then it's game over. You will have to be happy if they throw  you 1%. You will have to lick the crumbs off their table.

Of course, some of the low earners suck, some don't have enough budget to do marketing. The least we can do is to give them a chance and supply them. Some will fail, no doubt, the time that we have invested is in vain, but if we don't support the low earners get ready to be sc%#*$ by those con artists really hard.

I submit to the Big4 and the other ones that have an easy upload. On most of the low earners I have a payment once a year. It can be $50 or $500. It might not be much, but put together it's around 20% of my microstock income. And that is almost without any trouble at all because I only submit to the sites that have easiest uploading procedures (for example 123rf, Veer, Canstock, Scanstock, Crestock, Zoonar, Cutcaster and lately Graphicleftovers). My micro portfolio does not contain any recognizable people so I don't have any hassle with releases.

If low earners really would like people to upload more pics, they should skip the categories and other extra work! (nobody needs categories anyways)

I am taking into account my sales, expenses and time spent on microstock to estimate my hourly rate.
It is, of course, a very rough guess estimate, but it give me an idea how much one hour of my time is worth in microstock.
Then, I can use it to decide whether to submit or not to a low earning site depending
on how much time is needed for uploading and processing there.

Youre missing the point both of you!! if you gave up the small sites that just gave a payout, right. You would ofcourse have much more time over for the major earners, more time, resulting in much more uploads, in the long run resulting in more revenues!
You would have much more controle, much less hassle. I mean just think of an MR, going to say 7 differant sites and all with their own MR policies.

putting all eggs in one basket, is one saying but putting them in too many???  well look what happend to GM ( with 20 brands)

You mention Veer, as example,  sure!  but whats to say that Veer will still be around in a few years time? they certainly cant rely on Corbis to bail them, I can tell you that and with the going track, just look whats happend to many sites lately, StocXpert should have taught us a lesson.

There are 3 million pictures at CS, and maybe about the same at other low earners. The big ones have 4 times more. So, there are 75% microstock shooters thinking the same way you do. There was no real reason to start this topic at all.

Quote from: lagereek on November 19, 2010, 12:35

Youre missing the point both of you!! if you gave up the small sites that just gave a payout, right. You would ofcourse have much more time over for the major earners, more time, resulting in much more uploads, in the long run resulting in more revenues!
You would have much more controle, much less hassle. I mean just think of an MR, going to say 7 differant sites and all with their own MR policies.

putting all eggs in one basket, is one saying but putting them in too many???  well look what happend to GM ( with 20 brands)

You mention Veer, as example,  sure!  but whats to say that Veer will still be around in a few years time? they certainly cant rely on Corbis to bail them, I can tell you that and with the going track, just look whats happend to many sites lately, StocXpert should have taught us a lesson.

There are 3 million pictures at CS, and maybe about the same at other low earners. The big ones have 4 times more. So, there are 75% microstock shooters thinking the same way you do. There was no real reason to start this topic at all.

well Dook!  stay out of it then!

Christian, I agree with you that right now the only sites worth expending a lot of energy on are the top 4.  I get 95% of my income from them.

OTOH, my productivity is pretty steady regardless of how many sites I upload to.  As mentioned by others, the smaller sites have extremely easy upload procedures. 

If I can get a payout every couple of months from the small sites then they are worth it for me. 

Hi Lisa! how goes?

well its the same here, 95% from the major 4 and this is what makes me think.

I have to say though when I first read this topic I thought it was going to be more about the micro model than whether you should submit to more agencies. I create all these images that people want to buy, and I definitely wonder sometimes if I'm selling them the right way. It kind of seems like trial and error sometimes.

I have to say though when I first read this topic I thought it was going to be more about the micro model than whether you should submit to more agencies. I create all these images that people want to buy, and I definitely wonder sometimes if I'm selling them the right way. It kind of seems like trial and error sometimes.

You got some good stuff in your book!

Micro?  hardly the right way of selling and for us who remembers the Trad-agency days, well its down out blasphemy, isnt it? selling off the peg for peanuts BUT!  its qite fun and it can be pretty rewarding and its opend doors for many. We shouldnt knock it, its become a living for many.
Whats the alternative? as far as stock, I mean?  hanging around in some RM agency and wait for the ship to sink?

Youre missing the point both of you!! if you gave up the small sites that just gave a payout, right. You would ofcourse have much more time over for the major earners, more time, resulting in much more uploads, in the long run resulting in more revenues!
You would have much more controle, much less hassle. I mean just think of an MR, going to say 7 differant sites and all with their own MR policies.

putting all eggs in one basket, is one saying but putting them in too many???  well look what happend to GM ( with 20 brands)

You mention Veer, as example,  sure!  but whats to say that Veer will still be around in a few years time? they certainly cant rely on Corbis to bail them, I can tell you that and with the going track, just look whats happend to many sites lately, StocXpert should have taught us a lesson.

Even though StockXpert closed, it was worth using them for the money I made and it really didn't take any of my time away from the other sites.  Stockfresh is the same, just FTP while doing other work, click a couple of times and it's done.

I can think of far better ways to save time, like not spending so much here

If I go through my last two months, I find that after Gettys blunder with IS, sites like FT and SS, is just moving closer and closer to IS and if this trend keeps up, well in a years time they will have overthrown IS, no doubt at all.
Makes me think that instead of spreading files around, left, right and centre, wasting time and effort, maybe a few choosen would do better.

I'm lucky enough to do really well in the searches at DT and FT.  Not all my images but enough to make a difference and because of that both of those sites do better than IS for me with FT more than doubling IS earnings. Unlike most people FT and DT are way in front of IS and SS.

^^^That's the other reason why I give lots of sites a chance.  If we all waited until they proved themselves, they wouldn't have a big enough collection to attract the buyers.  How can we expect sites to be competitive without supplying them with our images?  I just don't see how that works.

There is the risk that a site wont make enough money to justify using them but by giving them a chance, that risk is reduced.  waiting on the sidelines is going to make their task much harder and we will end up with just a few sites that pay low commissions and don't have much respect for their contributors.

The question was: Are we really doing it right?
We can't know for sure. We can only look back and around and try to learn from the past, from others and from our own experience.

But that's the problem, we can't look back. Crowd-sourcing is unique, Google is unique, the Net is unique.

Allow me to go back in time, 1985 I guess. The Net didn't exist yet. Science Fiction writers wrote about wrist communicators that would allow to send SMS messages all over the world. Ridiculous, isn't it?
The world was dominated by number-cruncher IBM with their big machines with a whopping 1MB RAM in a cooled shrine eating punchcards fed by priests in white coats that were called IT engineers. Syntax error in card 67646 and there went your night.

There comes this young company that invented minicomputers, called DEC (Digital Eqp Corp). Ken Olson, the visionary and founder stood on the steps of the Cannes convention center, telling the eager pundits (no blogs too) that in the nineties, 50% of the computers would be "networked". The pundits laughed out loud. I still remember the floodlights of the press. Why do you need a "network" to connect mainframes when hard-disks are cheaper? A 1MB disk was just 4000$.  

Ken didn't know (or he did) that the PC and Macintosh would be around that same year. He threw his "Vaxmate" on the market there in Cannes, just to find out that 2 years later, the IBM PC destroyed his minicomputer market by a clever OS written by a college dropout nerd called Gates. I pulled the thick yellow Ethernet cable myself through the corridors since my company didn't believe in this fad. I had to bribe the budget for the cable out of other budgets myself, but I had no personnel.

Since then, DEC is long gone and IBM and GM too. A Britt in Switzerland combined Gopher and hypertext into "http" and for a year (1991-1993?) it was the toy of rocket scientists. Little did we know. 640KB (RAM) ought to be enough for anyone, IBM declared, and they allowed Gates to write OS2/Windows, since the money was in hardware anyways. Hahahaha.

Enters Netscape 1.0, first with text-only, then with images. Those were the heydays of Compuserve dial-in for the in-crowd with their patented GIFs. It's still 1994. My 56KB modem was a marvel, and so was my phone bill. Compuserve had its own chat, personal profile and sites. They let that weird Net in later, too little and too late.

The Net took the world by surprise and so did Google later. Web 2 was founded on the ruins of the first Bubble and tweets and faecesbooks destroyed fine social sites like MySpace and Friendster. Why? Myspace was fine.

Most Microstock sites are just 5 or 6 years old. They are experiments in the WWW and nothing guarantees they will stay. How can we learn from the past when there is no past? In the digital WWW age there is no IP any more. The music industry has been ruined by it and the movie industry soon. Digital is free and there is an endless supply of it. The US lawyers may sue their @ss off but the US is done and over. They're just printing money since China stopped buying US treasury shares.
China is buying Ireland and Greece, and soon Portugal. In 2012, they will surpass the US in economic power. IP ceases to exist East of Berlin. What does the West do? Insist on "human rights" when the IP elephant is all over the room.

There is no past you can learn from. This is a total different world, as the world was before 1985 and 1968 and 1945. Enjoy it while it lasts. It won't last long.  

There is no past you can learn from. This is a total different world, as the world was before 1985 and 1968 and 1945.

Fly a bit higher and look at history from a greater distance: people are acting the same today as they did in the past and therefore history will repeat itself.
The differences are not that big.

Microstock has a short history, that's true. But as you could see lately with the commotion around the Getty/Istock greed, there's in fact nothing different from what happened in the past. People want to become rich and when they are they want to be richer and when they become richer they want power. History in a nutshell is: "I" want to be King and you must do what I tell you.

But the discussion was started about what to do in Microstock. Only uploading to the Big Four (remember that it used to be more then four not so long ago!), or also to the "lower earners".
As seen in the light of history, what should be wiser?  

... removed 4 posts that were just an off-topic insult exchange....

I remember using the original internet. The Military version. No chat rooms or email. Using the Dot Matrix Printers.

  I did the photos for the first IBM XT ads. There were going to be 2 in the shot on a double page spread, but one was stolen out of the messengers truck We had to shoot 2 shots and they put the 8x10 chromes together and made one shot, as this was the only completed model left in NYC. No one at that time thought there would be any use for these things aside from spreadsheets and databases like mailing lists. When I got my first digital camera, none of my clients would use it because they liked being able to take a chrome to the printer for color matching. But if I had not gotten into digital then, I'd have lost out on a lot of good years. You can never predict what will happen 10 years out, but the next 2 years looks pretty stable, and that's good enough. The hard part is to see change when it's coming, and embrace it. If all the big agencies turn into one, that would ultimately be great, in my opinion, because it's much easier to compete against one big supplier than dozens of smaller ones. If there was just Istock, the smartest thing they could do would be to secretly fund a competitor.

But the discussion was started about what to do in Microstock. Only uploading to the Big Four (remember that it used to be more then four not so long ago!), or also to the "lower earners".
As seen in the light of history, what should be wiser?  

Well my only point was you can't tell in advance what business model will take off. It's merely coincidence. The best stock site - technically - has always been Canstock. Duncan had some very innovative ideas (like keyword relevance) but he had to sell the shop. As to iStock, it's clear they want to get rid of the small unsustainable contributors for now, but what will happen when the financial guys sold or dumped them? Will they go back to their roots? They have some pretty good reviewers, a loyal customer base and a lot of karma left.
If another model will take off, it won't be more of the same, but totally different. We don't know yet. What if Google takes over all shops with Google Images for a placement fee? What if Flickr realizes its potential? I don't know.

People might think they are losing income by neglecting sites who produce a smaller percentage of that income. However, you have to evaluate your business model. Are you spending time on those smaller sites? How much time? Could you take that time and redirect towards the sites producing a higher percentage of your income? It's similar to marketing your photography in any field. Who do you want to target? Do you want to spend your time shooting for clients who will pay you $500, $800, $1000 an hour ... or do you want to spend all day goofing around for a couple hundred bucks? My moto is leave the chump change for the chumps.

I don't feel like I waste any time at all on the smaller sites.  Graphic Leftovers is just FTP in the background and that's it.  Most of the sites have a few clicks to submit, I can do that in an add break while I'm watching TV.  It has never taken 1 minute away from my photography, I don't do that 24/7, sometimes it's nice to have a distraction.  Only using the top 4 or 5 sites would damage my earnings and with the way they often treat their contributors, I would soon become demoralized.

Some of the smaller sites are so much better than the old ones, I really do think the top 4 sites could have some competition in the future but there's no chance of that if we just put up with the big sites cutting commissions.  I also don't like the way the big sites have huge collections that they could easily trim down but they prefer to reject more new images than get rid of ones that are years old and much lower quality.

Canstock, technically best??  surely you cant mean that.

Actually I meant the contributor side of the site, years back, not the buyers side as I wasn't a buyer then.

Look! dont matter if its Trad-agency or Micro, an Agency is as good as its Search-engine, thats the heart of any photolibrary business. period.
The CS and DT, searches lay importance on showing series of almost identical images on premiere search-pages, showing incredible lack of variety. This is regarded as one of the most derrogative aspects in any search-engine.

Well that's correct, and I discovered that too. As it isn't mathematically possible to do a relevant search on databases with millions of images, buyers apparently limit themselves partly to the first pages and to visual search (the majority of my DT sales is found by N/A). If there is an image "good enough" on the first pages, a jewel hidden on page xyz will not be sold. To escape that math dilemma, many sites added biasing features like N sales, karma of contributor, N views.
That's what we all experience: the idiosyncrasies of a SE can make or break you.

I guess that sites that have the most "honest" SE like DT and CanStockPhoto will produce the most similars on a relevancy search by necessity.
Sites with a very biased SE (like the best match of IS) won't.

The reason for this is that all the keywords have equal weight. SLocke made that remark here yesterday. I wrote about that 4 years ago when DT still had 300,000 images. I won't spill the beans any more by telling some sites allow their reviewers to add a rating to an image so it will popup at a more advanced position. But still, the closer you stick to relevancy, the more you risk rows of similars.

On DT, the dilemma is solved elegantly by switching from relevancy to downloads in the SE. You get a sort of Darwinian sorting then of the "best", as proven by sales. You won't have rows of similars either then.

Quote from: lagereek on November 23, 2010, 02:18

Canstock, technically best??  surely you cant mean that.

Actually I meant the contributor side of the site, years back, not the buyers side as I wasn't a buyer then.

Quote from: lagereek on November 23, 2010, 02:18

Look! dont matter if its Trad-agency or Micro, an Agency is as good as its Search-engine, thats the heart of any photolibrary business. period.
The CS and DT, searches lay importance on showing series of almost identical images on premiere search-pages, showing incredible lack of variety. This is regarded as one of the most derrogative aspects in any search-engine.

Well that's correct, and I discovered that too. As it isn't mathematically possible to do a relevant search on databases with millions of images, buyers apparently limit themselves partly to the first pages and to visual search (the majority of my DT sales is found by N/A). If there is an image "good enough" on the first pages, a jewel hidden on page xyz will not be sold. To escape that math dilemma, many sites added biasing features like N sales, karma of contributor, N views.
That's what we all experience: the idiosyncrasies of a SE can make or break you.

I guess that sites that have the most "honest" SE like DT and CanStockPhoto will produce the most similars on a relevancy search by necessity.
Sites with a very biased SE (like the best match of IS) won't.

The reason for this is that all the keywords have equal weight. SLocke made that remark here yesterday. I wrote about that 4 years ago when DT still had 300,000 images. I won't spill the beans any more by telling some sites allow their reviewers to add a rating to an image so it will popup at a more advanced position. But still, the closer you stick to relevancy, the more you risk rows of similars.

On DT, the dilemma is solved elegantly by switching from relevancy to downloads in the SE. You get a sort of Darwinian sorting then of the "best", as proven by sales. You won't have rows of similars either then.

Hi!
Just for the heck of it, go to CS and search "industry worker"  in the ordinary search ( not advanced)  you see same guy, same angle, everything about 20 times and on first page, know what the fun of it all is?  none of all these have got more then 1 DL  and this is on FIRST page!!

Yep, it could be a bit more variety, couldnt it?

Well it seems to me that once you have an image ready to upload you have done 90% of the work.

Agree. Most smaller agencies have easy submitting.
Exception is submitting at Panthermedia for example. But for me they are worth the time, I am doing well there.

Since most here find all sorts of reasons for uploading to anything and everything. Can anybody think of a reason for not uploading?

Yes, the risk that they close the doors after you've done a lot of work, like my experience was at Zymmetrical.
That's the reason why submitting only makes sense when it doesn't cost you a lot of time or when you are doing well at an agency.

But even the bigger agencies can fail when they choose the wrong course.
The bigger the ship, the difficulter (and time consuming) is the turn.

Youre thinking of the StockXpert case? right  but SX, was brillant and not a small agency, it was one of the big four if Im not mistaken and very well managed.
I got a feeling the smaller ones grew thanks to leftovers, when a contributor couldnt get his/her images past the editors of the big four, they threw them into one of the smaller ones.
At least thats how they got off the ground I recon.
Ofcourse if you really look at some of these smaller sites its pretty easy to see that many are in it just for a quick buck, thats it, a few years turnover and then gone. So a whole heap of independants are uploading like crazy also hoping for a quick buck but ofcourse the result is peanuts, really.
I dont know but somehow I dont get this or am I missing something?

No, I am not thinking of StockXpert. They were not a new and they were not a small agency.
And no, I don't think that new agencies are in for a 'quick buck'.
As John Griffin from Cutcaster wrote a while ago: "I am working my butt off..."
Perhaps some of these agencies are going to make it, but it's not easy money. Not for us and not for them.

and if new small agencies arent in it for a quick buck??  they must seriously think that as a new player they can compete with the established ones? which ofcourse is impossible, so why are they in it?  for the fun of it?
I happen to know a few guys who ventured into Micro only a few years back and they were certainly in it for a quick couple of years revenue

Quote from: lagereek on November 23, 2010, 02:18

Canstock, technically best??  surely you cant mean that.

Actually I meant the contributor side of the site, years back, not the buyers side as I wasn't a buyer then.

Quote from: lagereek on November 23, 2010, 02:18

Look! dont matter if its Trad-agency or Micro, an Agency is as good as its Search-engine, thats the heart of any photolibrary business. period.
The CS and DT, searches lay importance on showing series of almost identical images on premiere search-pages, showing incredible lack of variety. This is regarded as one of the most derrogative aspects in any search-engine.

Well that's correct, and I discovered that too. As it isn't mathematically possible to do a relevant search on databases with millions of images, buyers apparently limit themselves partly to the first pages and to visual search (the majority of my DT sales is found by N/A).

Wrong conclusion imho. I used to go thru 20+,30+, 50+ pages (istock) and so did any of my colleagues (about a dozen people). Only previews(lot) are downloaded at the time of the search, those are tried out for a couple of hours. When we saw that a paritcular one works in the layout --> return to the site, go to bookmark and download. No search right before the download.